Roger Goldman walks through the sea-front kitsch like a man in John Bunyan. The pedlars of human thighs modelled in candy, of corny hats with smutty messages, of Brighton rock, do but themselves confound. Such is his strength while I lust after hot dogs. All around us, families on holiday are pursuing relentlessly their forms of child-rearing. Educated parents lecturing babes in push-chairs, improvingly, at the appearance of every wave and seagull. Humbler parents indulging in that peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form of parental sadism which involves threatened smacks and offers of sweets. Toddlers all itching to get out of buggies as the sea invites. ‘Shut up, Stephen, you’ve had your crisps.’
Roger is wearing his butterfly jeans and a voluminous collar-less shirt belted at the waist. He has the martyr’s hat tucked into his belt. We walk well beyond the inhabited stretch of beach and come to rest eventually on some rather oily pebbles. Roger lobs aspirant stones into the sea with a strong bowler’s overarm which makes me catch my breath.
‘Are you glad you’ve left school?’ I say.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you?’ I try to put across to him how heady I was with joy the day I left school. Perhaps I am a bit of a fool. I tell him how my best friend, my dearest and best giggling companion, and I stuffed our hankies in our mouths during the last absurd rendering of’ Lord Dismiss Us’ at the final assembly; how we carted home a great quantity of accumulated litter from our desks in a plaid blanket which we carried between us down the hill. How we stuffed our school hats into a letter box and ate chips in the street, desecrating our uniforms.
Bless us all our days of leisure,
Help us selfish lures to flee,
Sanctify our every pleasure,
Pure and spotless may it be.
‘I bicycled straight home with Jonathan,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t anybody at my school I cared to celebrate with. My music teacher gave me a glass of terrible sherry.’
To meet up with John we walk up through the Brighton Lanes where I am too shy to stop and look in shoe shops lest Roger think me trivial. John, who is waiting for us, treats us to steak and chips like kids on a boarding-school outing. All my outings with him have this air of semi-lecherous avuncular treat. It could be, given his versatility, that he is savouring the prospect of either one of us. As he goes off to visit the men’s loo the waiter brings me, as ordered, an apple pie with cream.
‘Nothing more for you, laddie?’ he says coaxingly to Roger.
‘I’m not “laddie”,’ Roger says haughtily. ‘I’m Roger Goldman.’ I start to giggle.
‘Laddie!’ Roger says to me in disgust when the waiter has gone. ‘It sounds like dog food.’ United suddenly by our delicious youth and the folksy word the waiter has chosen to emphasise it, we both get very high on uncontrolled laughter.
‘Oh dear,’ John Millet says patronisingly as he comes back.
The chapel is beautiful, hidden as it is among primeval green, being, as it is, more artfully lush within. John takes some photographs with a flashlight. It is as though the harvest festival were taking place on the walls. When I look down the nave, I see that Roger has mounted the pulpit. A thing I would never presume to do.
Roger drives us home with John Millet beside him in the passenger seat. We get back to find Annie is completely recovered and pottering in the kitchen with Jane. Jonathan, who is in his awful school uniform, is railing against the new English master who has put him down for detention, he says, for being cheeky.
‘You are cheeky, Jont,’ Jane says without concern. ‘I consider it part of your charm, but you cannot expect others to do so.’
‘The bloody fool asks me to paraphrase “heaven’s cherubin, horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air”,’ he says, thumping about. ‘What’s the fucking good of paraphrasing it? It sounds better the way it is.’
‘What did you say to him, Jont?’ Jane says.
‘But don’t you agree, Jane, it makes nonsense of it to paraphrase it?’ Jonathan says.
‘What did you say to him, Jont?’ Jane says insistently.
‘I said if he didn’t understand it he shouldn’t be doing it with us.’
‘And?’ she says archly.
‘He said if I was so clever would I like to take the class. So I took the class. A bloody sight better at it I was, too, but he made me stop after about ten minutes because it showed him up. He’d better not try and be funny with me again,’ Jonathan says. This is bigger and better trouble-making than I ever dreamed of. Silently, resentfully, I hand him the crown.
‘You watch it, Jonathan, that’s all,’ Jane says. ‘Neither Jake nor I will be on our knees before the Head, pleading on your behalf when he decides to throw you out.’ She turns to Roger. ‘The young ladies ‘phoned for you, Roger. The ones with the tennis court. They want you to play tennis with them tomorrow.’ Roger shrugs.
‘They play tennis in white togs,’ he says nastily, ‘like walk-ons for Cinderella on Ice.’ I quail before this snobbish indictment and thank God that I always hid in the library during games. If I had played tennis I would almost certainly have done so in white togs.
‘Go on, Rogsie,’ Jonathan says, as Jane makes us tea. ‘I’d go for the one with the legs.’ Roger says nothing. He goes out to fetch his violin. ‘I have to go now,’ he says to John, who gives him the car keys.